With the advent of satellite-based navigation, aircraft navigation has become very accurate. While improved navigation accuracy in general is beneficial to aircraft navigation, it also has drawbacks. For example, published flight paths may become crowded with aircraft sharing the same flight plan that is generated automatically for many aircraft.
To address the issue of highly accurate aircraft navigation crowding published flight paths, a manual flight crew procedural workaround may be recommended. The procedural workaround may include having the flight crew manually add a continuous offset to the flight plan. For example, the flight crew may add an offset of one nautical mile to the right of the flight plan, and thus the flight plan may deviate continually by one mile during the duration of the manually entered offset.
A disadvantage of the current method is that existing flight management computers (FMCs) only allow manual entry of flight plan offsets in whole number nautical miles. Further, the offset value is a fixed value for the duration of the offset, increasing the likelihood of flight crews picking the same offset value. Although desirable results have been achieved using prior art methods and systems, improved aircraft flight plan navigation would have utility.